Scalable Nanomanufacturing focuses on bridging nanoscience and manufacturing toward scale-up nanomanufacturing of functional nanomaterials and systems for practical impacts. Our approach is to understand the fundamental manufacturing issues/barriers and then apply physics to create novel processing methods to achieve scale up nanoproduction.

There are strong demands for long metal nanowires (10s to 100s of nanometers in diameter) as a key component in flexible transparent electronics, highly sensitive biomedical sensors and devices, catalysis, bendable batteries, and photonics to achieve unprecedented performance in numerous applications.

However, there exists fundamental size and aspect ratio limits in that ultralong crystalline metal nanowires are mostly beyond the capability of current manufacturing techniques. We developed, for the first time, a nanoparticles-enabled approach is capable of overcoming the fundamental limit imposed by the fluid instability during thermal drawing of ultralong metal nanowires. This new mechanism of suppressing fluid instability by nanoparticles not only enables a scalable production of ultralong metal nanowires, but also can find widespread applications beyond thermal drawing. >>Read more about our publications